Do Viral Giveaways Actually Help You Get More Followers?

When we talk about running viral giveaways, one of the most common questions is…

“Do giveaways actually work?”

For many people, giveaways are a new and different marketing tactic.

Everyone knows about SEO, online advertising, and social media.

Those marketing channels are familiar… while giveaways are a hidden marketing gem most people don’t know about. 💎

Here are just a few examples of how giveaways can lead to insane results for you:

30% of AppSumo’s revenue for years came from giveaways. This is how AppSumo bootstrapped their business to an 8-figure company. Giveaways were the best ROI in all of the early AppSumo marketing strategies.

When you’re launching a new product, giveaways can help you get new customers: Ryan Holiday ran a giveaway last month and got 6,144 subs in two weeks.

Misconception #1: Giveaways result in bad subscribers

Picking the right prize

Any marketing channel can lead to bad subscribers or customers if you set up the wrong targeting.

Just like targeting your Facebook Ads or Google SEO keyword strategy correctly, targeting is important with giveaways too.

To make an uber-successful giveaway, choose a narrow product your IDEAL customer wants.

For example:

Noah Kagan’s audience is interested in travel and entrepreneurship, so he created an Ultimate Traveler giveaway that generated 23,127 entries.

Ryan Holiday ran a book giveaway for 10 copies of his signed book. This generated 6,145 entries — that’s 6,145 people Ryan can also sell to in the future…

A California surf company is running a giveaway for a new surfboard and accessories. All entrants in this giveaway are super targeted for their niche audience.

Focus your giveaway on your niche or target market — like Facebook ads, when your targeting is too broad, you get bad results.

For example, if you give away an Amazon gift card or iPad, that may be too broad.

But when you focus specifically on what your audience might WANT or NEED, you can build a list of perfect subscribers for your business and drive incredible ROI from giveaways.

Keeping a healthy mailing list

Some people think giveaways “destroy” email lists.

Not true.

When you use proper email list cleaning techniques, your reputation won’t be damaged at all.

The team at AppSumo has grown an 8-figure business from giveaways. And so has Sumo.

Here are 3 strategies to keep your list clean:

ONLY add confirmed entries. Many giveaway tools will tell you if a user is a confirmed entry or not. To confirm an entry, the entrant needs to click the confirmation link in the giveaway confirmation email. In many giveaway backends, you can easily delete anyone who isn’t confirmed — and only add the people who are confirmed.For example, here’s the people we would keep vs. delete from a recent KingSumo giveaway…

Enable double opt-in. With every email service provider (like MailChimp), you can enable double opt-in. Similar to a giveaway confirmation email, the double opt-in email from your email service provider is an extra measure to make sure people want your emails.If you set up double opt-in and they don’t click to confirm their email address with your email service provider, they’re not added to your list

Clean inactives. To make sure your email list is super clean and your deliverability never suffers, we recommend removing anyone who hasn’t opened or clicked an email in six months. After six months, old inactive emails can become spam traps. Keep your list clean!

Misconception #2: You need a huge audience to have a successful giveaway

It can be easy to see some of the big names using KingSumo and think, “it’s easy for Noah or Ryan Holiday because they have a big audience.”

It helps… but you can still run an ultra-successful giveaway with a small audience.

For example, a small notebook manufacturer you probably never heard of called imStone ran a giveaway that got 3,370 entrants (aka new email subscribers)!

If you want to run a giveaway but don’t have a big audience, here are 3 FREE things you can do to get entries right now:

Start by using KingSumo. KingSumo is our free giveaway tool that enables you to create and promote your giveaway. Once you have your prizes in place, KingSumo will help you get your giveaway up and running in minutes.

Share your giveaway across social media platforms. Your own followers are low-hanging fruit for your giveaways. Share your giveaway with your existing audiences on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.Once you’ve shared it with your own audiences, try looking for some additional places to promote your giveaway. For example, Sam Jeffries shared his giveaway in a few Facebook Groups focused on his core audience.

It’s also worth scanning Reddit and submitting your giveaway on a subreddit like /r/giveaways (or another subreddit that has a lot of your audience)

Collaborate with people you admire to give away a package prize — and cross-promote. If you’re running a giveaway with no existing audience, ask other people to give you their products for free if you promise to link them in the giveaway and mention them on social

Many times, this is all they need to help promote your giveaway to their audience!

A recent KingSumo was able to launch a successful giveaway using this tip… and got in front of thousands of new people because of it.